Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) are among the most adopted standards in the telecommunications and IT industries. SIP is used to establish multimedia sessions with multiple participants through the Internet. It is used substantially with Voice over IP (VoIP) and provides the basis for several standards including IP Multimedia Systems (IMS). It is used presently to control the communication sessions of multiple participants in regards to the exchange of audio and video packets and via its extensions to control the Instant Messages exchanges.
XML is used significantly for web services, content publishing and forms the basis for standards related to Voice over IP (VoIP) applications like Presence Information Data Format (PIDF, and VoiceXML. When coupled together SIP and XML offer numerous multimedia and communication features including: (a) VoIP call establishment (b) Instant Messaging, (c) Presence, (d) paging, (e) audio and video conferencing and (f) voicemail. Many other extensions to the way people communicate can be added to the above. For a good period of time, the W3C organization, OASIS, and other world-wide organizations worked intensively to setting-up an Internet infrastructure through which enterprises can do business supported by automated processes governed by computers. The internal mechanisms are all XML based and form what is presently known as Publisher-Subscriber infrastructures.
All the processes, protocol, and algorithms form a layered software infrastructure for the control and transport of media and data related Internet present and next generation services. Some of these software processes might impede on the delay implied by processing these layers in software. It is therefore, a need to move all possible computational processes in a corresponding hardware in order to save time during sessions.
This disclosure presents a high level description of an embedded system referred to as a Reconfigurable Multimedia Collaborative System (RMCS). The RMCS acts as a processor performing SIP and XML related tasks at the hardware level, which presently are all implemented in software servers or gateways. The hardware implementation of the combined SIP and XML computational processes is unique. The implementation of the RMCS relieves the computers and computer communication networks from a series of computational processes, as they are executed in the RMCS hardware, while its applications are multifold from an industrial and commercial point of view. The RMCS can be deployed or inserted into any VoIP or unified communication related system such as consumer devices, servers and gateways. With the RMCS embedded in VoIP systems, the telecommunications industry will benefit from augmented performance, scalability and device interoperability. It is also noteworthy that RMCS can serve as a central part of an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) which is considered one of the important wireless standards, initially defined by 3G IP forum.
One example of the RMCS is a nursing home equipped with RFID sensors and patients wearing small devices that are SIP and RFID enabled. When patients move around the nursing home, their presence (i.e. location) is updated through a WLAN when it changes. This simple technology where RFID, SIP and XML are coupled can offer caregivers an efficient, cost effective and fast methodology to monitor the locations of multiple patients simultaneously and provide urgent medical care as needed. The RMCS could also be implemented in small WLAN paging devices that can be used in restaurants or retail stores. As customers arrive to a busy restaurant, the customer is given a mini-pager and is asked to browse the mall until a seat is available which will be communicated through the WLAN pager.
Another usage of the RMCS is in the core of an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The IMS tasks are related to the delivery of the IP Multimedia to the mobile users. As of now there is not yet an appealing IMS implementation due to incomplete deployment of a series of protocols specified by various forums and their projects related to IMS such as 3GPP, GPRS, TISPAN, etc. Under these considerations, RMCS can accelerate the deployment of the needed set of protocols which will allow a more flexible access and usage to multimedia and especially voice applications over the fixed and mobile devices in a unitary way.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.